Brief Chat: Canadian Olympian Dylan Wykes

Dylan Wykes ran 2:10:47 for seventh place at Sunday's Rotterdam Marathon, making him the second fastest Canadian marathoner of all-

time; Jerome Drayton remains #1 with a 2:10:09. Wykes joins Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis, who met Canada's Olympic standard of 2:11:29, as their nation's representatives in the London Olympic marathon. The last Canadian man to run an Olympic marathon was Bruce Deacon in Sydney in 2000.

Wykes, who is from Kingston, Ontario, now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, but trained for much of the last four months in Flagstaff, Ariz. He made his marathon debut in Rotterdam in 2008 with a 2:15:16. Wykes won the 2010 California International Marathon in Sacramento in 2:12:39. Wykes attended Providence College, where he was the 2004 Big East Indoor 3,000-meter champion.

After your victory at Cal International, you set out to get the Canadian standard. You didn’t get it at Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront and you had stomach problems at Lake Biwa in Japan in early March and didn't finish. Were you starting to get discouraged and a little nervous that you might be running out of time and not be able to get Canada's 2:11:29 standard?Dylan Wykes: Oh, for sure. I had actually thought of Lake Biwa as my last chance. After I didn’t finish there, for a little while I didn’t even think about running another marathon, I just thought, “Ah, I guess I’m done.” Then my coach [Richard Lee] convinced me there was plenty of time to refocus and rebuild and do one before the deadline, which is April 22.

Rotterdam was six weeks after Lake Biwa, wasn’t it?DW: Right. It’s not like you can start from scratch and pretend you’ve got a while new marathon build-up to do. You’ve got to just put the pieces together.

How far had you gone at Lake Biwa?DW: I went to about 25K.

So it’s equivalent to a very hard training run, but you’re not getting into any serious depletion phase. Were you able to physically take charge of your running again right after that?DW: Yeah, I recovered fine physically. I probably ran 100 miles the week after Lake Biwa.

Was the problem in Lake Biwa just a case of having a bad stomach on the day?DW: Yeah, I had bad diarrhea. I don’t know how it came about. I had to take a few pit stops. After awhile, I was slowing down so much I thought, “I’ve just got to stop.”

Rotterdam is where your marathoning career began. When you did decide to regroup and give the qualifier one more shot, was your past experience there a bit factor in picking that one to do?DW: It was probably the #1 choice. Having the experience of having been there definitely paid off on the day, so it was a good decision. I actually didn’t have a lot of choice. I couldn’t get into a lot of races at that stage. My agent was able to get me into Rotterdam, so everything just worked out.

What other marathons did you try to get into?DW: Anything, really. London, Paris, and a few others. I think Vienna, maybe. I couldn’t get in as an elite athlete. We didn’t get to the point where we thought, “Okay, let’s just get a number.” We were trying to get into the elite field so I could have my water bottles at the aid stations and stuff like that.

North Americans don’t know as much about the Rotterdam Marathon as they so about London or Berlin. Are there portions of it that get into less populated areas? Is it a scenically appealing race?DW: Most of it's in the city. One part of it goes out around a big park with a lake in the middle of it. That’s pretty cool. But for the most part, it’s through the city streets. I think any North American should go experience a European marathon. It’s got a bit of a different feel. You’re running down quite narrow streets as opposed to the big wide streets we get to run down in Chicago and New York. And there are tons of spectators. It’s a big deal for them there in Rotterdam.

And does the course literally have no hills at all?DW: It has no hills at all. It has a bridge that you go over twice. It’s a pretty significant bridge, so that’s really the only hill. There are a few inclines, but it’s really quite flat.

In Rotterdam, what was your situation in terms of pacers? Were you left to your own devices or were there other people trying to do what you were doing, a 2:11 or so?DW: It actually worked out really well. There was a Dutch guy, Koen Raymaekers, who ended up one spot ahead of me. He had to run 2:10 flat to make the Dutch Olympic team [he ended up with a 2:10:35]. He runs that race every year, so the organizers had three pacers for him. And then there was also a Spanish guy who had to run 2:12 who brought his own pacer.

I knew prior to the race that this was going to be the situation, so I decided I was just going to get into the group. I didn't look at my watch until halfway. So it actually worked out really well in terms of having people of run with.

I assume the goal was just anything under 2:11:29. You ended up getting under that by quite a lot and you're Canada's #2 marathoner of all-time. But you weren't thinking about anything like going for Drayton's record, were you? DW: The only thing I was thinking about was a 2:11:27 or 28. Nothing else mattered. I didn't care what place I came.

And you got it by enough that you must have had some time to savor it?DW: Yeah, I definitely knew by 2K to go that something catastrophic was going to have to happen for me not to get it. I checked my watch with 400 to go and knew I was going to get it for sure. That was pretty exciting. I enjoyed the last 200 meters or so, celebrating my waving to the crowd, and a fist pump.

Have you heard from Eric and Reid, who are now your fellow Olympians?DW: I got messages from both those guys after the race. They were happy for me. They were happy that there was going to be a full team of Canadians going this time. I've been motivated by their efforts. When Eric ran his first one in 2:13, I thought, "Wow, that's great, I think I can do that." And then Reid ran 2:11 and I think Eric and I thought maybe we could do that, too. It kept raising the bar. I think that motivates everyone.

You're a vegetarian, aren't you?DW: I'm actually not anymore. I was for several years, but I stopped that a year and a half ago.

What was the reason you stopped?DW: I just felt like my performances were taking a hit. I wasn't as diligent with my diet as I'd been the first year or two I was a vegetarian. I just thought maybe I should try eating meat again to get back. I don't eat a ton of meat. I had concerns about iron. I had some low results on tests. It kind of made sense to [eat meat], even though I had ethical concerns.

Did your running at Providence College go as well as you'd hoped? Would you have expected better results?DW: In my final year, I got injured and didn't run indoors or outdoors and that was a big disappointment. Leading up to that, my years had gone okay. I feel like I underperformed in the big races when it really counted and ran well randomly at meets that weren't that important. I never earned any All-American honors. But I just stuck with it. I wasn't quite the star athlete I thought I would be, but it was still a good experience.

Were you already thinking that your future might be in something longer, like the marathon?DW: I never really thought about the marathon while I was in university. I didn't even run a 10K on the track there; I was mostly a 3K/5K guy. Once I finished there, I started doing a lot of road racing and eventually moved up to the marathon.

Surely, you're figuring on doing considerably better than 2:10:47 at the London Olympics.DW: It wasn't the smoothest run-up to [Rotterdam], with everything that happened in Japan and whatnot, so if I can get in a solid block of training and just keep building on what I've been doing the last three of four years, I think there's a lot more in the tank.

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